This is a rather unusual course in that it treats magic, witchcraft, and the
occult in general as serious topics of philosophical inquiry. We will
investigate the magical traditions of Paleolithic hunters, contemporary
indigenous peoples, classical Greece and Rome, medieval
Judaism, and the European Renaissance as important and more or less
disciplined attempts to understand the structure of the cosmos and the place of
humankind within it. We will argue that, far from representing irrational or
superstitious systems of belief, key esoteric traditions have played a central role in the rise of
art in the Old Stone Age, and of philosophy and science in the ancient, and early modern periods.
The syllabus is divided into five main sections: 1) The Magic of the Caves; 2) Is Magic Irrational?;
3)
Magic and Philosophy in the Ancient World; 4) Jewish Mysticism, Magic, and
Philosophy; and 5) Magic and the Origins of the Modern World in the
Renaissance. More complete descriptions of these topics follow below. The readings can be accessed simply by
clicking on the relevant links in each section.

The exams are averaged together and constitute one-third of your final grade;
the 2 papers are averaged together and constitute another third of the final
grade; class presentations, attendance, and participation are averaged together
and constitute the remaining third of the final grade.

Readings

All readings are on this CD and can be accessed through the links below. You
will need Adobe Reader in order to read the PDF files. If you don't already have
it, you can get it free at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

1. The Magic of the Caves

During the final quarter of the nineteenth century and over the course of the
twentieth, dozens of caves were discovered in Europe, especially in France and
Spain, that served as galleries for the art of the Old Stone Age. From 32,000 to
11,000 years ago, at a time when much of the European continent was covered with
glacial ice, early representatives of our species hunted great migratory herds
of such game animals as bison, horse, wooly mammoth, and reindeer. In the dark
recesses of the caves, often in places very difficult to reach, some of the Ice
Age hunters left engravings and paintings on the cave walls that are
masterpieces by any standard of aesthetic evaluation. Many of the images are
wonderfully realistic depictions of the animals that were hunted during the
period as well as the predators that stalked the hunting communities, though
others are abstract geometrical representations, sometimes standing alone, and
sometimes integrated into the realistic depictions. The meaning and purpose of
the cave art has been a topic of heated debate for more than a century. The most
important and influential scholar to participate in the early stages of the
debate was the priest-archeologist, Abbe Henri Brueil. On the basis of
ethnographic parallels with surviving hunting and gathering communities, Breuil
argued that the cave paintings and engravings were the result of magical
ceremonies meant to insure the rebirth and return of the great migratory herds,
as well as successful kills. Though Breuil's thesis dominated discussion in the
first half of the twentieth century, it fell into disrepute soon after as
mainstream archeologists became skeptical concerning the usefulness of
ethnographic parallels between prehistoric peoples and surviving so-called
"primitive" societies. Over the past twenty years, however, a new theory of cave
art has emerged rehabilitating the magical interpretation. By
focusing on abstract geometrical images rather than realistic depictions, the
archeologist, David Lewis-Williams, has compared the Old Stone Age cave art of
Europe with the cave art of the San Bushman who survived in South Africa into
the last century. According to Lewis-Williams, the geometric images painted by
the Bushmen record visual hallucinations experienced by their shamans who
entered into trance states to negotiate over game with animal spirits,
as well as to retrieve the lost souls of the seriously ill. Lewis-Williams
argues that the neurological makeup contemporary humans share with the Ice Age
hunters justifies the ethnographic parallel, especially since the same
geometrical "form-constants" are present in Paleolithic cave art, as well as the
much more recent cave art of the San Bushman. In this section of the course, we
will examine and evaluate the magical interpretations of cave art developed by
Brueil and Lewis-Williams as a way of beginning to understand magic in its
relation to religion, art, and altered states of consciousness.

Globalization is nothing new. In the 15th century, driven by famine, plague,
war, and social rebellion, Europe embarked upon a great period of economic and
political expansion into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the process, it
brought into existence a world-market that continues to shatter all traditional
forms of life. In the early stages of expansion, Europeans interpreted the
peoples they encountered in the framework of the Roman Catholic culture that
dominated the Western world. They saw the indigenous peoples as resources to be
exploited, of course, but also as souls to be converted and saved, and in that
respect as not very different than the pagan folk of the bible or Western
Europe's pre-Catholic past. But modern science was born along with the
world-market, at first in the form of the sciences of nature and than those of
society as well. With the rise of a scientific anthropology in the 18th and 19th
centuries, Europeans began to distinguish themselves from indigenous peoples as
possessing a rational intelligence that the latter supposedly lacked. The
persistence of magical practices in the native cultures of Africa, Asia, and the
Americas came to be regarded as the most telling evidence of their failure to
achieve the stage of rational development enjoyed by the enlightened elites of
Europe and its precocious outpost, the United States.

We begin this section of the syllabus by examining
the interpretation of magic in so-called "primitive" societies by three founders
of modern anthropology and sociology: James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and
Bronislaw Malinowski. We will pay special attention to the relationship between
magic, religion, and scientific rationality in the work of these writers.
Finally, by revisiting a famous debate in mid-20th century philosophy and
anthropology, we will ask whether the magical beliefs and practices of indigenous cultures
are irrational, or if instead they follow standards of rationality
appropriate to cultures in which magic is a lived experience.

The anthropological debate over the significance of magic usually assumes
that there is a clear distinction between Western reason and magical thinking,
whether found among the Azande of the Sudan, the Jivaro of the Amazon, or the
medieval peasantry of Europe. But when we examine the emergence of reason in the
philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, that thesis becomes difficult to sustain.
The fact is that mathematics, natural science, and philosophical thought were
bound up with magic and myth at their origin, and never really lost that
connection, especially in the tradition that runs from Pythagoras
to the Neo-Platonists. In this part of the syllabus, we will examine the role
played by magic in the work of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, and the
Neo-Platonic philosophers.

Pay special attention to the selections from Plato, but also to that
from Plotinus, which articulates the first developed philosophical theory of magic in the
documentary record. The story of Hypatia of Alexandria is also particularly
interesting, since this female Neo-Platonic philosopher may have been the first
prominent victim of a fundamentalist Christian witch hysteria. Not all
Christians, however, were hostile to magic. This section concludes with a
reading from the Christian Neo-Platonist, Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite, whose
book on the angelic hierarchies became a founding text in the tradition of angel
magic.

Kabbalah is currently a popular topic in the media and other forms of mass
culture, in part because of the association of such celebrities as Madonna and
Britney Spears with a watered-down and highly commercialized version of the
tradition. Kabbalah in its authentic form, however, represents one of the most
profound expressions of the human desire for direct experience of an Absolute.
An Absolute - "God" in religious language - is an Infinite origin and sustaining
principle of all finite being and value, a "highest object" of knowledge and
desire. Products of the Jewish exile in medieval France, Italy, and Spain, the
Kabbalists regarded the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) as a mysterious symbol
of the hidden life of God. For God, while eternal, is not static; He develops
through a process of internal unfolding marked by crisis and conflict. The
dynamic life-process of the Divine is also obscurely reflected in every aspect
of creation: the visible world of nature, the inner world of the individual
human soul, and the moral life of the community. In developing their methods of
textual interpretation, meditation, and prayer, the Kabbalists drew heavily from
the Neo-Platonic philosophers we have already studied. But these sages also
incorporated the magical practices and beliefs of the common people into their
sublime and learned version of mystical Judaism.

We begin by examining "Throne Mysticism" in the biblical book of Ezekiel, as
well as the book of Enoch, never itself accepted into the biblical canon.
These two scriptural sources inspired meditative disciplines dedicated to
guiding the soul in a dangerous ascent, replete with magical instruments and
passwords, through the seven heavens to a vision of God seated upon His throne.
Accounts of such soul-journeys stress the paradoxical character of the Divine
King, whose body is dimensionally infinite, vastly exceeding the understanding
of the soul that is nevertheless so powerfully drawn to it. Throne Mysticism was
both incorporated and surpassed by Kabbalism properly so-called. In the
remainder of this section of the syllabus, we examine the symbolism of fully
developed Kabbalah, which influenced the metaphysical absolutism of such
important later philosophers as Spinoza, Schelling, and Hegel.

The Renaissance marks the transition between medieval and modern Europe by
way of a paradoxical revival of classical antiquity. The rediscovery of Platonic
writings that had been lost to the West for centuries stimulated the development
of a new Humanism in philosophy, on the one hand, and a mathematical science of
nature on the other. Strangely, both of these developments were bound up with a
revitalization of age-old esoteric traditions. The writings of the fabled magus,
Hermes Trismegistus, were discovered at the same time as the lost writings of
Plato and Plotinus as a result of Western contact with Byzantium and the Arab
world. The Hermetic texts were written in the third century of the Common Era,
but the Renaissance translators mistakenly dated them to Old Testament times.
The writings were attributed to an Egyptian contemporary of Moses who
supposedly transmitted his magical wisdom to the Jewish patriarch, while they were in fact
the creation of several writers who lived more than a thousand years later, at a
time when Judaism, Neo-Platonism, and early Christianity were fusing in many
fascinating combinations, all of a more less occult character. Under the
influence of the writings, the most important philosophers of the Italian
Renaissance - Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno - became
neo-Hermetic magicians. At the same time, the rediscovery of Plato's writings,
as well, as some of the fragments of the Pythagorean school, led to a new
appreciation of mathematics as a key to understanding the cosmos.

In this section of the syllabus, we examine the link between Renaissance
humanism and Hermetic magic in the work of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,
Giordano Bruno, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa. We also investigate the role Pythagorean number
mysticism played in the work of Johannes Kepler, one of the key founders of
modern physics and cosmology. Finally we examine the great European witch trials
in their Renaissance context, characterized as it was by the social and economic
dislocation that accompanied the rise of the world market, as well as the
flourishing of Neo-Platonic and Kabbalist magic.